She could not stand it. Not the filth, the meals, not just the results of poverty but ignorance. She did not have the skills to instruct an ignorant housekeeper, for she had only known servants with experience and competence who needed only be told not to serve the oyster patties when the month had an R in it. Nor did she know how to cook herself, as Maria had done so well.

No more conversations with her sister-in-law; no reading to Maria from the Ladies’ Own Companion as they sewed in the parlour. Only Rose, soft footed, Mrs Taylor, the small contemptuous smile lurking at the corners of her mouth at this woman who could not cope with life out here.

Who. Could. Not. Cope.

And yet she might have, if there had been hope. If rain had come, the grass had grown, the sheep increased and with them the crop of wool, the wealth of Overflow.

No rain. No wealth. No hope.

Mrs Taylor swept, eventually, and sometimes dusted. Rose polished, did the washing and the ironing, and helped her dress. Flora lay awake at night, gazing at the plaster peeling from the wall, the hours broken by Clementine’s cry — a nightmare, perhaps — then Rose’s voice — the native maid slept in Maria’s room now — calming, soothing, so at the sound of it Flora slept as well. Dingoes howled up on the ridges. They sounded like the banshees her nurses had told her about when she was a child. Banshees called when death was near.

It seemed appropriate.

She left her corsets off. She would not ask Clancy — and certainly not Mrs Taylor — to lace them. For some reason Rose’s quickly veiled look of incredulity at cinching in one’s body with silk and whalebone meant she couldn’t ask her either. Her body felt as if it were not her own without them, sprawling untamed, as uncivilised as life around her.

She ate the dreary slattern’s food placed in front of her, the kangaroo stews, the dumplings and other foods made of no recognisable ingredients except large quantities of flour and dripping, not even caring enough to watch her husband and father-in-law eating, as if they did not notice this was not the food of gentlemen, or even that of a merchant’s clerk. She sat, empty eyed and empty hearted, in the silent parlour, watching a spider as large as Clementine’s hand climb the wall to hide behind a framed magazine print of the Queen. She should scream at this too.

Christmas . . . vanished. She was only aware that the date had passed when she received a Christmas card from England, two months late. She vaguely realised she should have been the one to give Overflow its Christmas, create a menu for a festive meal, buy or make presents for family and employees. Had the day been celebrated at all?